Businesses have traditionally attempted to automate and customize the way in which they interact with a customer. Customers contact a business through a variety of media. Often these media are referred to as “channels,” some of these channels include customer interactions made via: email, cable, satellite, fax, kiosk, Internet, or directly in person (hereinafter “walk-up”). Software is often deployed to transform customer contacts into interactions which are electronic representations of the communications occurring with a customer during a contact with a business. This may be accomplished by transcribing the communications by a business representative either during or after the contact, or may be readily apparent to a business software process when the customer is communicating through a business provided interface or device, such as an automated telephone menu or an electronic form. Converting these customer contacts into an electronic media permits businesses to evaluate and improve future customer contacts.
By improving the way in which a business interacts with a customer over a channel, the business improves its customer relationship thereby increasing the likelihood of retaining an existing customer, and potentially generating additional business from the customer. This process of improving and customizing customer relationships is often referred to as “customer intimacy.”
Businesses have also sought to reduce operating expense associated with customer communications. Believing that technology can assist in achieving customer intimacy as well as reducing operating expenses, businesses have developed a variety of technologies to personalize and automate customer interactions with the business. Some of these technologies include automated telephone support, automatically generating an email response, and world wide web (WWW) form processing.
Furthermore, businesses have recently sought to take advantage of the tremendous activity on the WWW by attempting to capture as much information about their existing or potential customers as possible and then warehousing this profile information in an electronic database. Intelligent software agents are being developed to mine the warehouse so as to create focused marketing and interactions with the customers. However, businesses are now recognizing that they have multiple databases with customer profile information and no cost effective means to have these disparate databases communicate with each other so as to present a comprehensive view of a single customer. Additionally, efforts seem to be disproportionately focused on interactions with customers which occur over a WWW channel. Along these same lines, business policies are difficult to enforce consistently when customers interact with a business over a variety of channels because the technology does not inter-operate well enough to permit consistent treatment of cross channel interactions with the customer.
An additional consideration impacting a business's efforts to capture customer profile information is the concern for customer privacy. As a result of this concern, federal agencies have begun developing privacy guidelines associated with electronic privacy. Additionally, some foreign countries have enacted stringent laws with respect to customer privacy. Businesses must develop applications which are flexible enough to respond to this growing tide of public sentiment.
Still, some attempts have been made at channel integration (often referred to as “media blending”). These attempts focus on publishing customer interactions across several channels upon completion of an interaction with no attempt made to capture multiple concurrent interactions with the customer on cross channels. Thus, prior methods do not permit near-term use of the customer interactions to enhance the current customer interaction. Further, these prior methods fail to capture all customer interactions occurring over cross channels. These failures result in customer interactions which fall between the cracks. The result of this is that businesses are not capable of presenting a comprehensive 360 degree view of their customers.
Finally, the explosion of technology and the ease of electronic communication have created an added pressure on businesses to provide to its customers all possible channels within which the customer can contact the business. Yet, the addition of new channels create stovepipes of operations that complicate managing the customer relationship and add overhead expense associated with the maintenance and support of the new channels of communication. Additionally, business have found it exceedingly difficult to connect customers to the appropriate business service provider as the subject matter and the channel associated with a customer interaction changes.
Accordingly, it is apparent that methods and an apparatus that permit near-term responses to a customer based upon cross channels of communication will allow for a closed-loop view of the customer and prevent interactions from falling between the cracks. This will engender greater customer intimacy by providing a comprehensive view of the customer (360 degrees). Further, it is apparent that any such method or apparatus must be mindful of business policies, and customer privacy.